Women collectors of South Asia: gender, material culture and empire

女性收藏家和捐赠者对包括大英博物馆在内的世界各地博物馆藏品的数量和意义做出了重大贡献，但迄今为止还没有研究调查她们的动机、做法和网络。大英博物馆的南亚藏品提供了一个理想的研究案例，为一个探索收藏和捐赠的性别性质的项目提供了基础，并有助于揭示女性在帝国和后殖民背景下的作用。该项目将调查从南亚到大英博物馆和英国其他收藏品的女性收藏家和物质文化捐赠者的生活、收藏、活动、写作和网络。它将探讨女性如何以及为什么收集物品，是什么激励了她们，她们如何获得关于她们的收藏的知识，以及她们向博物馆捐赠物品的动态。以南亚的物品为出发点，该项目将以殖民和/或后殖民背景为背景，在此期间，南亚，英国和后来的英属南亚妇女在大英帝国及其后果下谈判生活的挑战。它将为我们了解大英博物馆做出重要的原创贡献，展示种族、性别和帝国是如何影响藏品的形成的。它将质疑收集和参与物质文化在多大程度上是女性建立自己的网络的一种手段，以及这些网络如何与帝国和后帝国背景下的种族和社会分歧相一致或挑战。它将以大英博物馆为起点，追踪选定女性的生活，以及她们对大英博物馆和其他博物馆的收藏和捐赠。对象本身将被研究以及相关的档案材料在大英博物馆和其他博物馆的收藏。个人文件和出版物将进一步阐明妇女收集和捐赠的方式、她们在其中行动的网络、协助她们的中间人以及如何传播这些知识。这是一个及时的项目，因为性别和物质文化在我们对帝国历史的理解中越来越重要，它将在将女性定位于博物馆收藏历史的中心方面开辟新的领域。

Women collectors and donors have made major contributions in terms of quantity and significance of objects to the museum collections across the world, including the British Museum, yet there has been no study thus far which examines their motivations, practices and networks. The South Asian collections at the British Museum provide an ideal case study around which to base a project exploring the gendered nature of collecting and donating as well as helping to reveal the agency of women in imperial and post-colonial contexts. This project will investigate the lives, collections, activities, writings and networks of women collectors and donors of material culture from South Asia to the British Museum and other collections in the UK. It will explore how and why women collected objects and what motivated them, how they acquired knowledge about their collections and the dynamics of their donation of objects to museums. With a focus on objects from South Asia as the starting point, the project will be set in a colonial and/or post-colonial context, during which South Asian, British and later British South Asian women negotiated the challenges of living under the British Empire and its aftermath. It will make an important and original contribution to our understanding of the British Museum, demonstrating how race, gender and empire influenced the forging of the collection. It will question how far collecting and engagement with material culture was a means for women to establish their own networks and how these aligned with or challenged racial and social divides in imperial and post-imperial settings. Using the British Museum as a starting point, it will trace the lives of selected women and their collections and donations to the BM as well as other museums. Objects themselves will be studied as well as associated archival material in the British Museum and other museum collections. Personal papers and publications will shed further light on the way in which women collected and donated, the networks within which they acted, intermediaries who assisted them and how this knowledge was disseminated. This is a timely project, as gender and material culture are increasingly central to our understanding of imperial history and it will break new ground in positioning women at the centre of the history of the museum collections.